Anti-War Activism

New York City’s 33rd Annual April Fools’ Day Parade kicked off with a satirical take on Trump’s Military Parade. President Trump astride a tricycle mounted sling-shot launcher with a 10 foot tall rocket was joined by Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean “Rocket Man” Kim Jong Un who had his own smaller rocket.

April Fools’ Day is Joey Skaggs’ favorite holiday. Every year since 1986, to commemorate and celebrate the folly of mankind, he has organized New York City’s Annual April Fools’ Day Parade. Over the years, the parade has grown in stature and has now joined the ranks of beloved New York parades. In 2017, unlike other years when the parades have attracted major media coverage but have basically been a figment of Joey’s imagination, there actually was a parade. It was a Trumpathon!

In February 2001, Joey Skaggs was invited to participate in an exhibition at the Espai D’Art Contemporani (EACC) in Castellon, Spain. The show, entitled “En el Lado de la Television” [In the Side of Television] was intended to explore the relationships, contradictions and paradoxes between art and the mass media. Skaggs proposed a concept dealing with terrorism, violence and the media…

For more than three decades, New York City’s Annual April Fools’ Day Parade has offered the public an opportunity to express, in a comical way, its outrage against the foolishness of mankind. Thousands of participants in look-alike costumes with satirical floats creatively mock the thoughtless, corrupt and selfish acts of the past year. The parade marches down 5th Avenue from 59th Street to Washington Square Park where revelers rejoice and party. The event ends with the annual crowning of the King of Fools.

On the 4th of July, 1969, to protest the war in Vietnam, Skaggs erected four obscenely grotesque sculptures of the Statue of Liberty at Cooper Square in the East Village of New York. They were life size mannequins painted green and wrapped in barbed wire. One was in a wheelchair. Several were holding dismembered baby doll bodies instead of torches.

On Christmas Day, Joey Skaggs and friends constructed a life size Vietnamese Nativity scene in New York’s Central Park and, dressed as American soldiers with plastic and wooden weapons, attempted to burn it to the ground to protest the war in Vietnam.